# Gavin Andresen
# 2011-09-24 00:09:16
# https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=44423.msg542230#msg542230

@s{quotedtext}
@s{quotedtext}
 @p{brk}
Well, CPUs are easy-to-program general purpose hardware that can do lots of things (and several things at the same time, in these days of multicore CPUs) pretty darn fast. @p{par}

GPUs are hard-to-program more-specialized hardware. These days they can do pretty much any raw calculation a CPU can do, faster@p{--} it just takes a lot more effort on the programmer's part to figure out how. That extra effort is only worthwhile for the most performance-critical code. @p{par}

When I worked at Silicon Graphics I saw several interesting algorithms implemented using OpenGL operations reading and writing to texture memory and/or the accumulation buffer and/or the framebuffer. That was before OpenCL and GPU programming languages, but the experience gave me a lot of respect for the ability of good programmers to look at problems sideways and come up with ... interesting ... solutions. @p{brk}